Jackson's Dilemma

by Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch's 26th novel is a romp as well as an homage to that master of convoluted comedy, Shakespeare. She has adopted a syncopated slightly mocking tone, and many scenes have a distinctly theatrical air. She has also achieved a disarming sense of timelessness, due in part to the fact that her eccentric characters, a close-knit circle of friends, are extremely well-off and spend their days and nights dashing between their country estates and their London houses. The tale begins on the eve of a wedding. Edward is to marry the lovely Marian. Benet, his rather fussy friend and neighbor, is in charge of the proceedings.

Marian's note leaves everyone in a tizzy.

Who is Jackson? Where is Marian? The darkness of mystery mingles with the lightness of comedy for something completely different.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, Novels, Literary Fiction, Literature, 20th Century, Contemporary

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch

Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease.

"She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction." (John Bayley in Elegy for Iris, 1998)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Mur...

Reviews

[Dr. Cat in the Brain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recently I was asked if there are books that are so challenging they could take a single year to read?

And the answer is yes.

Of course.

Especially, if by reading we mean to say 'understanding' the work. In that case there are single poems that could take decades. You could spend a year on a sentence.

It's such a cliche to mention Shakespeare at this point. I risk coming off like Harold Bloom, but I will be reading Shakespeare until I die. I've been reading Proust, Melville, Dostoevsky for most of my life. And every time I go back to these writers, I see more, I feel more, they enrich me. Great authors pay off the reader for the investment of their time and attention. But there are also authors whose work that I return to again and again, who are not complex. Who are fun and simplistic. Because there are depths and wisdom in simplicity.

We are drawn to various stories over and over for various reasons. We are drawn to great meaning. We are drawn to great feeling. We are drawn to the great intangible. And we are drawn to great design. In my opinion the best books, the best art are a combination of all these elements. Because that is the human condition, defined.

Which brings us to one of the greatest romantics (and so one of the greatest imaginations) of all-time: Iris Murdoch.

A writer whose work requires a deeper appreciation for aesthetics, poetry, mythology and is also accessible and wonderfully personal and full of emotional and immediate value. Her work both excels and is remarkably universal, it exists completely outside modern trappings and yet is always in the moment.

Murdoch's fiction and her prose notably layers and weaves symbolism to philosophy and comedy and tragedy. Her writing is a style of fiction that expands after you read it. Her work gets bigger in your head. It gets bigger in your life. She expands you. Her work can be very challenging for certain readers and at the same time very fun to read, but it requires a lot of thought to appreciate.
You can read an Iris Murdoch book in a day and spend 20 years going back to it and finding meaning in it. And the more you understand other concepts, the more life experience you have, the better her work becomes in retrospect.

Message to the Planet is an excellent example. I've had friends who dismissed that book, and came back to it years later, re-discovered it and found it to be the most important book they've ever read. It took me years to be smart enough to really appreciate that novel. And it is still, very much, out of my league.

But my deeper appreciation for that book is not just from education, it is from life. It is personal. Sometimes to truly comprehend something you must come to love it. You must come to care about it. Sometimes we do not see the small, important details, if we do not really care. When we are reading a work and are too self-absorbed, we can miss the work. I think the reader's greatest lesson, their most important trait, is empathy. When we lose that, we lose any ability to really understand. And so we lose the ability to read.

But to open yourself to an experience in a complete way? There is a terrifying vulnerability in that too. It can be very dangerous.

And that brings us to JACKSON'S DILEMMA.

The last Iris Murdoch book and one of the most hotly contested. It was written during a time when Iris Murdoch began to suffer from Alzheimer's.

I think it is one of the most important books she ever wrote because it speaks to the difficulties she faced. To her fears, to her isolation. The slow erosion of her social circles. The collapsing world of her memories. And the emotional weight of caring.

Whether or not the disease truly is responsible for the stylistic differences from her other books is up for debate. But it is notable that her vocabulary is much more limited. Her prose style is less intricate, less vivid. In Jackson's Dilemma everything is slimmed. Including the book's length that doesn't match many of her other works. Also certain ideas and plot points are repeated in a strange way, as if she forgot that she already mentioned them.

But even if this is the result of sickness and not deliberate stylistic choices? In this mental state, Murdoch is head and shoulders above most of her peers.

Facing a disability, she better defines what it means to confront such a problem than the majority of other authors who write about it. At her weakest she is better than most writers at the peak of their intellect and craft.

In such a state she creates this Shakespearean, timeless, light and deep romance of errors. Where a disastrous wedding is the backdrop for several biting commentaries on character and culture, survivor's guilt, love unrequited, affairs and an analysis of Heidegger's Essence of Truth.
Much of this novel is about the importance of caring towards the development of understanding. Not just understanding the world, but understanding each other. How problems develop in the dark. And also it re-introduces (in a subtle way) the paradox of caring and understanding leading inevitably to suffering. A point Murdoch brings up time and again and that she discussed in Message to the Planet. Much like the revelation of Vallar, we realise that sometimes the more you care, the more you see, the more you are hurt. That truth is not equivalent to reality, it is simply a commentary on reality.

The whole of the novel's message is embodied in the character of Jackson, who comes into the book much like Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name from Spaghetti Westerns. An ageless, timeless, unknown. A mystery. A variable. Only he's not here to win a gunfight, he's here to help lovers and friends find each other. A mysterious figure who sees more than everybody around him because he cares more. And so he has experienced more. His empathy towards the characters unravels their mysteries and their machinations and allows him to help them discover themselves. And what they really desire. In doing so he frees them from their guilt and their pain and the chains of their heavy pasts.

But at the same time Jackson is a sad character.

He carries a weight in his heart and in his spirit. He sees in a way that can help everybody around him. But he cannot help himself.

When perceived through the perspective of the other characters, much like James Arrowby in The Sea The Sea, Jackson is almost comically blunted down to one dimension.

He is in the room with these people who are too self-absorbed to understand each other. They cannot even recognise the obvious desires of their own friends. A collective myopia which leads to all of the conflicts and woes in the novel. Jackson can help these people and free these people but despite his love for them, they do not know him and they never will.

And so he carries this cross that is his alone.

This is comparable to mythological and religious figures (obviously), but it is also the human condition for many kind and wise people. To be able to offer understanding to others and help them grow is a gift. But to never find such a gift for yourself can be torture. To realise that such understanding is scarce in the world, can darken the world. And worse still, even if you could share that understanding, to make someone else truly comprehend it, that can be the same as hurting them. Terribly. And can you do that to someone you care about? Someone you deeply understand?
Loving others can lead to a sort of self-isolation. Like Jackson, like Vallar. And this is a topic that only became more profound and evident in Iris Murdoch's writing as she grew older and this sickness began to settle in. This line of thinking runs through The Black Prince, The Green Knight, The Sea, The Sea, Message to the Planet. Helping others through understanding, but that same understanding leading to the destruction of self. Social enlightenment developing into a spiritual absence.

The more you feel, the more you will know. And the more you know, the more you will suffer. Such is the dilemma of love.

So yes.

Understanding is difficult. And reading, which is understanding as a mental exercise, can be the most difficult. So a great book can take you a very long time to read. Some books will take a year. Some books will take decades. But I believe the best books (and the best writers) are never really finished with the reader.

Their work lives in the moment with us, changes in the moment, with us. And the more we understand these books, the more difficult they become.

Which is why for those who love Iris Murdoch, the work is never done.

[Cecily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Her last book (published in '95). Apparently set in modern times (eg computers self-consciously mentioned in passing), but very old fashioned feel. A bride disappears on the eve of her wedding, leaving friends and family devastated and perplexed, with hurt and mysteries in their own past to face up to.

Doesn't flow quite as well as some of her earlier works; in particular, it is somewhat disjointed and, especially towards the end, rather rushed with sections of very theatrical dialogue, which don't ring true.

Linguistic analysis re her Alzheimers has shown how limited the vocabulary and how simple the sentences are compared with her earlier works: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articl....

[Hugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having completed Richard Powers' novels with Prisoner's Dilemma, it seemed natural to pick this one up next, as it also completes a bigger set for me.

It was Murdoch's last novel, and to be brutally honest it doesn't stand comparison with the ones that preceded it - it is quite short by her standards and she seems less in control of her material, for example she repeats two of her introductory paragraphs (one on the location of a village church and one of the languages the Berran sisters know).

Having said that, it is still quite an entertaining read full of her characteristic tropes, and I am sorry there are now no more to come - I must reread some of the ones I read before joining GR.

[sedge · Rating 3 out of 5]

As he was walking towards Victoria Station Benet renewed his guilty misery (60).

That, in a nutshell, captures the affectless, unpunctuated tone *and* the sticky emotional content of this book.

This is such an odd book that I don't know what to say about it, let alone where to begin. There isn't a plot in any traditional sense of causality, but there is a sequence of events, though some of the most important ones (and their actors) remain untold. These events and their actors are, roughly, thus: a group of friends, assembled over the years by a man now dead, gathers at his estate, now in the hands of his nephew Benet, in the English countryside for the wedding of two of their own. The night before, a note from the bride-to-be is found, calling off the ceremony. People return to London, or stay in the country, and there is *a lot* of anguish, though no one ever seems to do anything. Then Benet's mysterious servant Jackson unravels the mystery, reunites the former bride-to-be with her Australian lover, and everyone else pairs off -- though still within the confines of the group -- in unexpected ways. Along the way, Jackson is fired by an obscurely jealous Benet, but the two are reunited as everyone else gets married or something.

I love Murdoch. Her ability to relate the events and storms and *bright flashes* of human thought is unparalleled, as is her uncanny capacity to make thought sensuous and sensory impressions, thoughtful. It's as if she writes from the very level of nerves, from within a tangle of ganglia, where thought and emotion and sensory information all exist as snaps of electricity. Her talents, however, go misused in this particular book; they're wasted on people of little consequence who obsess over very low stakes. About halfway through, I had to stop reading and wonder aloud if the reader *really, truly* is supposed to care that a wedding got called off. Are those seriously the stakes here?

...yes, those are the stakes. I don't know what to make of that. Shakespeare's comedies, of course, follow such silly contrivances and sequences, too, but I can't help feeling that their status as *plays* makes the difference. As plays, the events and the characters are intrinsically external, outside the reader/viewer, ready to be performed, but the novel's interiority, *especially* in Murdoch's hands, works against readerly sympathy (let alone identification) in this case. The effect might be different were any of the characters to *do* something about the anguish, "darkness", "hatred", that they all claim to feel.

I am also unsympathetic -- to put it kindly -- towards the novel's milieu. Many of the characters profess interest in what they call mysticism, and they have the moneyed leisure to pursue these interests. One, the least interesting of the lot, is a woman named Mildred. Though Mildred wants to be ordained as an Anglican priest, she also worships at the Indian Gallery of the British Museum:
Mildred dreams of glowing birds flying in darkness, of cobras stretching out their hoods, and dear Ganesh, and dear Ganga, Ganges. Buddha incarnate in Vishnu. So Shiva with Parvati, Shiva dancing in a wheel of fire, Krishna with his milkmaids giving himself to each.
She had not discussed 'worship of idols' with Lucas. She felt, emanating from the images, these live beings, a profound warmth of passion, of love, that of the gods themselves but also of their numberless worshippers. In India, at every street corner, the god with garlands round his neck. This was religion, the giving away of oneself, the realisation of how small, like to a grain of dust, one was in the vast misery of the world.... (207)
Um. The orientalist *awfulness* of this can't be rendered, not by direct quotation, not by my summary. The museum as an archive of British colonial looting, transformed into one loony woman's personal temple...I have no words.

Nor do I know quite what to make of the (traditionally English and terribly nasty) classism espoused and embodied by these characters. On his first return to the country since the wedding's cancellation, Benet realizes that he "must" put in an appearance: He had no business in the village. But suddenly it occurred to him that he precisely *had* business in the village, he must *show his face*. He must let them *look at him*, and *pity* him, and get their *sympathising* over with. (66) This book is *not* set in 1875 (or 1935), when such patronizing attitudes were, though never forgivable, at least widespread. Benet's out-of-proportion sense of his own importance doesn't just baffle me; it irritates and *pains* me.

As protagonist, the reader unfortunately spends a lot of time in Benet's head. It is a deeply unpleasant place:
But what now also disturbed him, paining him so, was Jackson. Perhaps he might have consoled himself by reflecting that Jackson had no right to interfere with the problems of others and might even, in doing so, make all sorts of serious mistakes. Jackson, a servant, should not, leaving his post, have run away to sort out chaotic love affairs, and in doing so dabble in impertinent deceptions! (200)
Jackson is just about the only sympathetic soul in the book; he is also, and I don't think this is a coincidence, the most *underwritten*. He has one name, variable ages, and might be an instantiation of Jesus or god or something. He works hard in a book where *no one* worries about a farthing; he is exhausted when no one else does anything but ring up the others and ask for news. I remain ignorant of just what his dilemma was, but I'd like to think it was whether or not to poison the lot of them at their next pretentious, self-aggrandizing dinner party.

For all that, this book abounds with Murdoch's lovely and *creepy* turns of phrase, as in: "Beneath their soft loving voices their thoughts ran to and fro like mice" (236). There is a lonely horse in a pasture between the two estates whom I quite liked.

However, no one reflects, no one strives, everyone wails and tears their hair over trivialities and wallows in nasty, unreconstructed prejudice. I think it's cruel (and pointless) to chalk the novel's flaws up to Murdoch's Alzheimer's; we should all be able to write half so well at our healthiest. The flaws, rather, emanate from an anachronistic, and never to be mourned as it passes, milieu of the idle and the selfish. Becoming trapped in their nervous systems was both unpleasant and unenlightening, but more than anything, it was just...pointless.

I need to re-read Murdoch's The Philosopher's Pupil and The Sea, the Sea. Both knocked my metaphysical and sensuous socks off and they might help wash my memory clean of this experience.

[Chrissie · Rating 2 out of 5]

No, I don’t recommend this. I was intrigued at the beginning, but by the end I thought it a total fizzle.

The eponymous Jackson is a mystical figure. He has a talent for bringing lovers together. By the novel’s end, a string of marriages has taken place and previously troubled relationships are back on track. Who Jackson is remains unclear but as a mender of hearts he is supreme! Don’t envision a happy, humorous figure. He is dreary.

Humor is not an element of the book!

Philosophical and religious concepts of those such as Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgengstein and the Indian deities Buddha, Shiva and Krishna are put forth but never in an informative, straightforward fashion. Ideas are presented in nebulous and mystical terms.

I could not get a grip on the message the author wished to relay. Jackson’s powers border on the divine, but what this says is not clear.

As with most of Murdoch’s books the focus is on a group of close friends. They are London based, wealthy, own a house or two, are educated and well read. Dabbling in the arts, one might classify them as dilettantes. The time setting is after the Second World War. At the start, the details about each pique one’s interest. As the story continues what Murdoch does with the characters becomes trite and one loses interest.

Neither is the writing up to Murdoch’s normal standard. Wording is redundant. A character “hurries quickly”. In just a few lines “then suddenly” is used several times. These are just two examples, but there are many.

This is Murdoch’s last book, written four years before her death. Perhaps her writing ability was influenced by Alzheimer’s. I didn’t notice problems at the start, but by the book’s end I could not help but think that maybe this was true.

The audiobook is narrated by Juliet Hills. There is nothing wrong with the narration, but neither does it sparkle. Words are spoken clearly, and it is not hard to follow. Three stars for the narration.

*******************
*The Black Prince 4 stars
*A Fairly Honourable Defeat 4 stars
*The Sandcastle 4 stars
*The Sea, The Sea 2 stars
*Jackson's Dilemma 2 stars
*The Good Apprentice TBR
*The Message to the Planet TBR
*The Bell TBR
*The Unicorn TBR
*The Time of the Angels TBR
*The Flight from the Enchanter TBR

[Jean-Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given that this is Murdoch's last novel, given its abysmal rating, and given that I had read somewhere about it having been used to study the effects of Alzheimer's disease, to which Murdoch succumbed within four years of the book's publication, I had somewhat tempered expectations. Happy to say that I was wrong, a few stylistic quirks aside.

It is Iris Murdoch's country house novel, centered around an almost-wedding and a servant, the Jackson of the title, whose presence never quite feels organic to the plot. There's a lot of running around between the countryside and London, a lot of telephone calls, a lot rather theatrical agony, fainting or almost fainting, and a lot of rich people, often thirty-somethings, constantly calling each other 'dear' like a bunch of octogenarians, all while speaking in paragraphs stiched together with an abundance of commas and dashes. Then, of course, there's words like then and of course, which seem to become a sort of narrative crutch at times.

There are references to Heidegger—surprise, surprise, one of the characters is writing a book on philosophy, and even a brief reference to Yukio Mishima posing as Saint Sebastian (one of the characters is a gay artist with a fondness for pornography). There's the sea, the sea, with its stony beaches, and a drowning which makes up my favorite section of the book, along with several unexpected couplings, all Murdoch hallmarks. Repetition, a strange use of italics, and an overabundance of exclamation marks! add to the maelstrom, but are hardly the end of the world. Several of Muriel Spark's later novel show equal or greater decline, and she was merely an old woman. For more concerning the end of the world, simply open a newspaper.

[zunggg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Murdoch's 26th and final novel, written as the dementia, still undiagnosed, was beginning to impinge on her mind, is strange, bittersweet, and mysterious. In some ways it's a redux of her preoccupying themes and motifs: Shakespeare, philosophy and its intersection with mysticism and religion, impulsiveness, fate, the unknowability of the self. It's shorter than most of her novels, but not less rich or complicated. It's a swirl of misguided, very obviously Shakespearian lovers disarranging each other and being re-arranged by an ineffable external force, the titular manservant who is introduced gradually, seemingly insidiously, by Murdoch into the book as he introduces himself into the lives of the other characters. At first Jackson reminded me of the malevolent, dependency-inducing butler in Robert Maugham's The Servant. But I should have known better. Instead he's a Prospero, a metaphor for the artist at the end of his (actually her) career, setting her artistic affairs in some sort of order and preparing to depart the stage. The book's poignancy comes from this, and it should probably be read after the other 25 Murdoch novels (it's my ninth). But it's still a cleverer and more beguiling novel in its own right than most writers produce in a lifetime.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Her last novel. Many seem to think that she wasn't very well. I found "Jackson's Dilemma" rather good fun but incredibly confusing. And not very well written. At times it felt that no one was able to hear the latest gossip or even open their front door without "almost fainting".

On the plot, I thought we'd established that Edward "liked Benet ... but he did not get on with Benet's friends"? And we know that Edward only visited Penndean once before Uncle Tim's death ... and yet suddenly he's a firm part of the "Uncle Tim set" and Benet's like a father to him and everyone's simply devastated when the wedding doesn't happen.

Was Jackson Jesus? Was Cantor the devil? When we meet Cantor at Barker's he has "thick blondish heavy hair ... he with his large blue eyes, yet wild, like an animal". Jackson meets Cantor a few days later and he "was a young man with thick long dark hair and large wide open staring brown eyes". Is this an homage to the Elias Canetti character in "Flight from the Enchanter"? "Jackson glanced down and saw that it was a hundred pound note". A £100 note? What does this mean?

I confess that I'm not entirely clear on what Jackson's dilemma was. Is she being ironic? Jackson does an awful lot, and always seems rather sure of himself; coming and going as his will dictated. Is it at the end, and whether he should remain with Benet?

[Marina the Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

I used to like Iris Murdoch - found there an unabashed mysterious romanticism. But in this one she keeps introducing more and more characters - all tell, no show, until I had to abandon it.

[Shane · Rating 2 out of 5]

If this had been a book by a debut author, I would have set it aside after the first chapter. But the chance to read Dame Iris Murdoch’s last novel was too tempting, so I kept ploughing through. I ended up with mixed feelings.

On the positive side, this book is termed a social comedy, and that it is, peopled by fragile, self-absorbed, trust-fund babies who will never do any good in the world but roam around navel gazing—except for Jackson, that is. Their sexuality and sexual orientation are also in doubt, for many of them gush with angst and loss and express their love in words but with very little action. The pivotal attempt is a proposed marriage between Edward (a trust-fund baby) and Marian (she has a rich mother in Canada) that gets called off at the last minute by the latter who then disappears leaving the wedding party in tatters and tears for almost the entire book. This event provides the drama and tension to galvanize everyone into colliding and pairing off differently, until everyone is matched up again, albeit with different partners. The mysterious Jackson, who appears out of the “derelicts who live under the bridge” to become Benet’s (another trust fund baby, and Edward’s country manor neighbour) servant, is a Jeeves-like figure, a jack-of-all-trades, who knows what these delicate upper class types need. He is also plagued by his own misgivings and guilt, and I never quite figured out what his dilemma was, unless it was the keeping of secrets from his masters as to how he resolved the wedding fiasco.

On the negative side, there were many shortcomings in this book. When I read the opening paragraph that had sentences like, “The sun was shining.”, “Edward was good looking.”, “He was twenty-eight,” I knew there was trouble ahead. The sentences got more complex later on, but I felt that Murdoch never quite breathed life into her characters. They functioned merely at the conversational and the “grand theatrical gesture” level. Many of them—like Edward, Marian, Tuan, Benet and even Jackson at times—seemed to drift like people under the cloud of dementia, tired and unsure of their bearings, and I wondered whether this was mirroring the author’s own health challenges at the time. The characters blur into a sameness in their anguish. Jackson’s meticulous list-making, packing, and checking doors before leaving the house, Benet’s innumerable repetitions insisting that Marian had committed suicide, Rosalind’s constant assertions of her love for Tuan, felt like someone wrestling with Alzheimer’s and wanting to constantly get their facts in order. Digressions into philosophy, a Murdoch hallmark, were plentiful, but the timing was inconvenient: why the heck should Benet be agonizing about Heidegger when he is in the throes of organizing a wedding? The elements of novel craft were lacking: key items like Edward’s former relationship with Anne and Rosalind’s love for Tuan are suddenly dropped on us, and the whole Cantor-Jackson episode appears contrived. The novel’s ending was tepid.

The lesson from this novel is that an author, or their agent, should know to quit when they are ahead. Given that this book was published during the author’s life and before she was officially diagnosed, it may not have done her any good, other than be treated as an experiment in a new form and style the author was exploring. And yet her determination to keep writing despite the looming health crisis is to be lauded. Also the fact that this was a novel with multiple threads, all of which had to be cleverly and intricately interwoven (sometimes she succeeded and sometimes not) would have kept Murdoch pleasantly challenged as she headed towards the abyss.

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

The last of Iris Murdoch's novels, Jackson's Dilemma was written while Iris Murdoch was beginning to suffer from Alzheimer's disease. This is not a novel to introduce someone to Iris Murdoch with, it is a weak example of her ability. This novel, for me - while certainly interesting, marks a sad end to a brilliant career. It is a tragedy that someone whose writing has been lauded by so many should finish their writing career with a whimper rather than going out in a blaze of literary glory. There are moments however where it is obvious that the clouds lifted for a while, and it is still possible to see the gifted writer she was. Overall - a poignant read for any fan of Iris Murdoch.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I enjoyed this character based novel. There are a number of interesting characters that Iris Murdoch richly describes.

Readers new to Iris Murdoch should firstly read ‘The Bell’, ‘The Black Prince’ or ‘The Sea, the Sea’.

This was Iris Murdoch’s last novel.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was with some sadness that I picked up this, Iris Murdoch’s twenty sixth and final novel after spending the past 25 months reading one novel a month. It is far shorter than most of the dozen or so novels that came before it and I had to wonder if this had something to do with it being her last published book before her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Initially the novel did indeed feel different, the sentences were shorter, there were less descriptive passages with beautiful language and I began to have reservations as to whether this would be a letdown after so many brilliant books.

However, although this may not be her best book for me there is still so much in it to enjoy and appreciate. As with all her novels this is very much character driven and we have that familial group of characters that her books often center upon, most if not all of whom are going through some emotional turmoil and crises primarily to do with love and relationships. There are secrets of the past and present, there are evocative scenes of country houses and London streets and iconic buildings like the British museum which features in other novels and it is also, I believe, her first novel with a setting outside of the USA or Europe with Marian’s trip to Australia.

The title is somewhat cryptic as is the man himself. We never get a clear handle on Jackson who when we meet him is a kind of live in servant to Benet, and by the end it’s still not entirely clear, what the ‘dilemma’ itself might be. The way he is introduced to the story and the tale of how he came to be in this position, plus the fact that he is competent at so many things keeps the sense of mystery going. None of the other characters seem to quite know how to describe him and have great fun imagining where he came from and what his past life must have been. He is variously compared to an avatar, a dark monk like person, a ‘snake in the reeds’ and Caliban from the Tempest, probably someone who has suffered greatly. Perhaps this mystery or his aura of competence is why so many of the others want to own him, take him away with them, even Benet who initially was so wary and suspicious of him. Jackson says himself that he makes up his age when people ask him and this air of secrecy, the sense of him as a ‘watcher’ could make him seem a sinister character, but this is mitigated by his care for and ease with so many people. No one really knows Jackson and he alludes to the fact that he doesn’t really know himself but this seems to be for him almost a source of power and by the end it doesn’t really matter. As Benet says, ‘Jackson had wrapped himself in a cloak of mystery, was it worth trying to unwrap him.’

Benet on the other hand wants to be capable like Jackson, being the character who is trying to bring all the others together, yet he is at a life crisis of his own, a writer who can’t finish his book and a matchmaker who has failed in these endeavors. He spends much of the novel in a state of anguish trying to mend affairs and find those who are missing and who clearly don’t want to be found. It becomes clear he has a complicated relationship with Jackson that verges on love but it remains unstated all the way through the novel. At the same time he is mourning his Uncle Tim, another influential figure whose sage advice and spiritual vibe he longs for while blaming himself for the events that take place and worrying about Edward in particular.

Edward is the ‘hawkish’ young man who at the beginning of the novel is about to be married, a solitary figure who lives in a large house in the country and has a great loss in his past as well as a secret which is eventually revealed. Edward is described as ‘odd’ even ‘fey’ and very possibly ‘under a curse’ at the beginning, but by the end has transformed into a “dear knight” and this is a novel of transformations for some of its characters. Tuan, for example, is another person who undergoes change in the book or at least is viewed differently by those around him as the novel progresses. A timid quiet man who is searching for some kind of mysticism he is also characterized by a burden he feels he is under from his Jewish heritage. The responsibility to hold the pain and grief of the Jews of the past, including his father and grandfather, holds him back from living life fully and the fact that he has been given the name by Uncle Tim of a character who transformed his own history, perhaps sets us up for his metamorphosis into another of the ‘knights’ of the tale.

If there are knights then we must have princesses and Rosalind the young relative of Benet is one in appearance and romantic behavior while her sister Marianne is rather more of a narcissistic teenager in her claims to have suffered more than anyone else-ever. Mildred and Anna the older woman in the novel are far more appealing if not playing as large a part as woman have in these last books. Mildred is deeply spiritual and often goes to the British Museum to gaze upon statues of Indian gods and goddesses. At the same time she is hoping to become a priest while also being compared to the Lady of Shallot and described as ‘a pale maiden’, more fairytale references. Mildred as all the women in the novel feels a connection with Jackson, everyone likes to believe they can work him out and Anna is no different as she ponders whether to fly and take him with her.

Flight is somewhat of a feature of this novel, Edward, Tuan, Marian, Jackson, Mildred and Anna all ponder at one time whether they should leave yet at the end most of them are right back where they started at the beginning of the novel, if in rather different circumstances. The ending is almost Shakespearean in its neatness but this seems fitting for the last novel Iris Murdoch ever wrote. Jackson of course has the last word as befits the central character and one who remains mysterious to the end. Murdoch’s novels always leave us with something unexplained, however small, she always left us wondering and wanting more and what a shame it is that eventually that had to come to an end.

Some Favorite lines

‘The great silent trees, faintly visible, were outlined against the starry sky whose crowded curtain reached down to the darkened horizon of the garden. The air was think with moisture and the smell of dewy earth and the faint perfumes of leaves and flowers and the fresh breathing of the huge tall trees.’

‘Ahead there was just the sea and above it the sky, a pale blue above the penciled line, a few chubby white clouds lounging dreamily below a radiance of gold, but higher up the sky seeming to lose its colour altogether in a trembling stillness of pure light.’

[Lee Foust · Rating 2 out of 5]

We, this is a very strange novel. Not as in an artist straining to do something odd or starting, just strangely off. Since novels, generally, these days are written and re-written, workshopped, edited and beta-reader-ed, they are mostly sharp and, if anything, over-elaborated, this novel, on the other hand, is a mess.

Seeing that it was a mess, that there were too many characters and that we kept jumping between them oddly, getting nowhere, getting the same information twice, or no information to explain things that needed explaining, I ventured to look the novel up on Ms. Murdoch's Wikipedia page and discovered that not only is this her last written novel, but it was written during the early stages of the Alzheimer's that would kill her four years later.

Apparently the novel was written out by hand and then printed with a minimum of revision. Why, under these circumstances, this was done was not explained. Still, it remains an interesting example of a kind of nuero-divergent text. literary legacy and authorial integrity aside, therefore, I found this both rather intriguing but also a real slog to read.

Aesthetically, as I said above, it's a mess. The pot is deadly slow, the characters actions and descriptions repetitive, their joys and sorrows so overblown as to be laughable. Everyone is always tired, suicidal, guilt-ridden, and falling asleep. Yet, since a this is so unlike any other near-contemporary novel, it was as oddly intriguing. The only similar reading experience I can relate it to is reading Raymond Roussel many years ago. Not a strained or artistically controlled weirdness, just something off enough to be noticeable and entirely disconcerting.

Wikipedia as notes the author's vocabulary was down some 20 or 30% from her previous works. Even so, this novel had six or seven times the vocabulary of most bestsellers, and about a thousand times that of our immensely popular so-called populist politicians. Go figure.

[Cathy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Usually I give it 50 pages or more, before I give up. I tossed this after 20 pages, it was just not working for me. I found the writing style so distracting, that I could not develop any interest for the story. Just too quaint. Or too unrealistic for the setting. I am not sure, I am still trying to decide, why this book put me off so quickly. Trying to be Jane Austen, just without being funny and witty?
This is my first Iris Murdoch. Perhaps I should have tried an earlier one. I am wondering, if she was already affected by Alzheimer's, when she wrote this? It would go a long way in explaining, why a supposedly great writer could produce something so uninteresting?

[Stephen Brody · Rating 3 out of 5]

A characteristically improbable assortment of fearfully proper endlessly-talking muddlers, ninnies and drunks have gathered in and out of a pair of grand-sounding country houses for the occasion of a wedding between an excessively tight-lipped young man and a flighty Canadian young woman, neither of whom appear really to know much about the other nor indeed why they are marrying at all. On the eve of the event a note is delivered anonymously to announce that the bride-to-be has called it all off, or “bolted” as a less nice bystander very indelicately puts it (with a livelier suitor as it turns out). The more emotional of the guests, always ready to blame themselves for anything that goes wrong even if it has nothing to do with them, immediately go into paroxysms of grief and unnecessary apology, consoling and cautiously touching each other with much useless hand-wringing. This is a typical passage:

“Yes, yes. Oh Edward - I’m so terribly - sorry.” She put a hand up to her throat.

With a kind of military precision Edward was pouring the boiling water into mugs. He said ‘milk and sugar?’ Rosalind nodded. He said, ‘Let’s go upstairs. Would you like to look at the pictures?’ He gave her a mug and left the kitchen carrying his own.

Rosalind, holding her mug carefully, followed him up the stairs. She did not want to look at the pictures. She wanted to sit quietly beside Edward and talk to him. Pausing to sip the coffee, she found it burning hot, and without milk and sugar."

Stumbling unheedingly past a Goya she inevitably spills some of the liquid on a Jacobean parquet floor and surreptitiously tries to wipe it up with her sleeve, in spite of the presence elsewhere in the house of miraculously efficient and obliging staff.

This is so exaggeratedly Murdochian it’s difficult not to burst out laughing on the spot. Yet it was apparent that in this, her last novel published in 1995, something had gone wrong, the sentences have shrunk, it’s all too insubstantial and incohesive, the ‘story’ such as it is and especially from one who was a master story teller is frankly ridiculous and it’s patently not meant to be funny. Iris Murdoch was by then seventy-six and her many admirers were ready to say, oh well everyone goes off sooner or later, and to continue reading for old times’ sake; the exact nature of the ‘going-off’ was not generally known then, until some distressing details were rather unpleasantly, even gloatingly, broadcast after she was safely dead.

The exact nature of Jackson’s ‘dilemma’ is not made very clear either. It’s not clear at all even who Jackson is. He’s a sort of superior servant in the London house of an owner of one of the country estates, a man of unsurpassed timidity and fretfulness. Jackson was ‘discovered’ by Uncle Tim, a character dead at the time of this story but, it’s hinted, possessed of some mystic intuitive powers picked up from years spent in India. A certain mystique hangs vaguely over Jackson: “Can it be that one particular person, sent by the gods, is singled out for another particular person?” As he can do anything (the others are all completely useless, nearly having a nervous breakdown over a fused light and resorting to hysterics at any moment) he’s become indispensible. It’s he of course who tracks down the runaway and mediates between them. His employer is peeved that he might ‘entertain women’ in his spare time; actually he hangs around the Embankment after dark, for unspecified purposes.

Along I imagine with every other Murdoch enthusiast I was disappointed with this novel when it first came out. On second reading it has its points, if the infuriating manner of most of the characters can be ignored; the temptation would be to pick them up and give them a good shake to restore some ordinary common sense, and they become so increasingly silly and implausible by the page that only two possible alternatives are available – either that they represent (rather bizarre) allegories or ‘images’, or that their creator is quite insane. The second can be dismissed without question. One very interesting though undeveloped theme takes up a sort of Indian ‘spiritualism’, the impermanent but also transforming nature of things where ‘coincidences’ are invisibly meaningful. Another is hidden relations between siblings. The prospective bridegroom has seen his slightly younger and preferred brother drowned before his eyes; the run-away girl is warily jealous of her less beautiful but cleverer sister. Both are stricken with what they call secret guilt – a trumped-up and false emotion in my opinion, but no less damaging for that, and if it invites ‘psychological’ interpretations those have to be resisted in the light of Murdoch’s aversion to facile deterministic explanations. Much more startling – but quite accurate if one thinks about it - is the hint or implied suggestion that a great or even larger part of our existence takes place in the minds and thoughts of others and of which we have no awareness at all, a real metaphysical dilemma – which here is the only explanation for the maddeningly shadowy portrayal of the protagonists. Take Mildred for example, who though that is where she is sometimes to be found, would surely be an unlikely guest in a stately home because she’s a case of ruthless moral masochism carried to the level of craziness, a woman who yearns to squat in the dust with the lowest of the low in order the more noticeably to hold up a placard announcing her own virtuousness and thus see it reflected in the eyes of those who couldn’t care less what she does. She’s supposed to have departed for India with eager anticipation of the starving misery there awaiting her charitable sympathies but reappears inconveniently. “She had put her flat up for sale but had not decided where she was going to live in India. She had been to the British Museum to consult her gods but had received no definite answer …. During this time of painful indecision, as a sort of penance, she had gone to the East End of London to prepare herself for more terrible scenes” and had there met an Anglican priest of her own distorted persuasion and received an illumination. “It had become clear to her that after all it was not necessary to go to India, she was not so called, what was needful was there before her”

“I even went to the British Museum and stood before the great image of Shiva, and saw him nod his head”.

An irritated listener is not impressed. “Well, blow me down. And what about that priest of yours, when are you going to marry him?”

Mildred’s ambitions have widened, suddenly she imagines herself as a Christian priestess. “I may yet hold the Chalice”.

“You’ll want the Grail next. See how your eyes gleam!”

To laugh or to cry, when poignancy exists cheek-by-jowl with bathetic absurdity we can be sure we’re in the presence of a great writer. Becoming fuddled or not, Iris Murdoch was still sharp enough to be gathering together the many threads of years and experience, if decipherable only to those whose experiences she also did so much to widen. There’s so much to think about in this novel in one direction or its opposite that we can forgive the soppy ending – they all marry each other and go completely silly by being magick-ed into a state of eternal beatitude and bliss through holy love etc even when they may strike the reader as intolerable bores - and when most of us anyway are fairly silly most of the time. Perhaps that’s what Iris Murdoch was really trying to say, we’re all hopelessly fuddled and the only solution is to make the best of it each according to his lights.

[Gary Branson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well done. Good characters and plotting. A bit confusing as times and there are a couple of characters that are irrelevant. I especially liked the last couple of pages when Jackson is recognizing his own mortality, felt as if Iris was channeling herself.


A bit melancholy for me since it’s the last one. Started in May this year and read all 26 of her novels. Quite an experience and very glad I’ve read them. Oddly, my least favorite was the Booker prize winner and I’m unable to say what was my favorite. So many I liked for different reasons. I think I liked the first half better than the second half. I liked the shorter ones better than the longer ones.

[Italo Perazzoli · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am writing this essay with some tears on my cheeks.

This novel was the last one of Iris. According to some literary critics and fervent readers, here there are the traces of her illness, I won't argue about this thing.
The most philosophical phrases are:
"This was religion, the giving away of oneself, the realization of how small, like to a grain of dust, one was in the vast misery of the world - and yet how vast the power of goodness, of love, like a great cloud, lifting one up out of the meanness, the deadliness, of the miserable ego"
Reading this passage I am asking to myself the utility of religions, it seems that the humans cannot say in name of God because we are not enough intelligent.


If so I'll think like Benet: "This wonder was connected with ‘Who am I?’ or ‘What am I?’ Benet had discovered quite early in life that Uncle Tim shared this lack of identity"
Maybe the lack of his identity is due to a religious problem, and it can be resolved if we believe in reincarnation, according to this logic, we are conscious that in every human beings, plants or animal there is a percentage of God.
"What is mysticism, can it relate to philosophy? How does all this relate to ‘God’, is there a God - a living God, does that not mean some sort of limited person? The great difference between the Jewish God and the Christian God."
I am thinking about the poem, "Passage to India" written by Walt Whitman.
Our society needs of a passage to India, in order to rediscover a true dialogue between different religions avoiding every kind of antagonism.
Another argument is the marriage, a masculine tool for posses a woman, which is most intelligent and sensible rather than her man, in other words the love is feminine and not masculine.
"Came back to see you marry another woman! That was the final torture, the last giving up of all things"

[Christy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tellingly Murdochian tale of a somewhat moneyed and intelligent engaged couple (Edward and Marian)whose wedding preparations are torn apart the morning before the wedding, and how this affects both the couple and the entangled relationships of those around them. All is mended by a mysterious manservant/friend named Jackson...

[Kelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

An unintentional call to arms against the landed gentry. If you find yourself hoping the bourgeois histrionics will abate or otherwise serve a greater purpose, you can just return this godawful book to the library unfinished.

[Bryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

***1/2 to ****
An intriguing elegant farce from an era of characters with wealth and hopeless idealism attached to religious, philosophical and strange reasoning. Interesting characters had a nicely wrapped up ending. It’s all a bit too good to be true. Delightful audiobook read by Juliette Mills.

Jackson’s Dilemma by Iris Murdoch is a philosophical and unsettling novel about a group of upper-class friends preparing for a wedding that collapses when the bride, Marian, mysteriously disappears. The story unfolds through their futile search and introspective dialogues on morality, art, and religion, revealing Murdoch’s signature themes of contingency and human frailty. The characters, often hapless and unlikable, embody Murdoch’s realism—fools remain fools. Jackson, a shadowy servant figure, emerges as a quiet, compassionate “fixer,” ultimately resolving the mystery and symbolizing understated goodness amid chaos. While the plot moves slowly and the dialogue can feel heavy-handed, the novel retains Murdoch’s eerie atmosphere, psychological depth, and moments of redemption, offering glimpses of humor, horror, and moral insight.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up in a charity shop, not realising it was Iris Murdoch's final novel, just keen to read more having read two brilliant books by her last year. This one is not as great - a bit wandering and flat - but still has sparks of inspiration and fun (odd) characters. Ultimately it reveals itself as a spin on The Tempest, which kind of works by the end.

[Stan Stott]

Poor soul couldn’t write a book to save her life once the Alzheimer’s had kicked in. Honestly a really awful read. It’s alright though she had already written 26 of them. That being said, the chance to see how Alzheimer’s writes itself makes this a lot more fascinating than many others…

[Emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

decent plot — ending lame

[Susan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gave up quite early on...

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jackson is not the only one with a dilemma. Since I put it down I've been mulling over how I feel and what I want to say about this book. Like the other four or five Iris Murdoch books that I've read, this story has haunted me a bit, perplexed me alot, and made me think about alot of different things.

After reading an Iris Murdoch novel, I generally wake up in the morning thinking about some aspect of the book. The image I can't escape from is that of an intricate line of dominoes---when the first one topples the remaining pieces gracefully (and quickly) start cascading down the line. In Jackson's Dilemma a broken engagement starts the domino effect and the reader is pulled into the maelstrom of activity that follows.

This story was not as compelling as other Murdoch tales, but I understand this is her final novel and her writing reflects some limitations in her health and ability. Even though I didn't enjoy this book as much as the others I've read, I still am fascinated by the universe she represents in her books. I am more challenged by her writing than that of any other contemporary writer.

This story didn't have the strident, omnipresent, essence of evil that is central to some of her other books. The contrast of good and evil is masterfully presented in some of her writing. But what IS here, either behind the scenes, or hidden behind a curtain, is the Deux ex Machina that propels the dominoes into action. There is always a force present in Murdochs books. Whether the reader understands it, or accepts it, is not the issue. Something powerful is present--and it influences the behaviour of the characters. For better or worse. But always, fascinating and thought provoking.

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

With regret, I have to give this a meagre two stars. It is apparent to me from reading this that Iris Murdoch's illness was taking its toll when she wrote this because it makes very little sense and there is so much repetition of the language (some of it very strange, e.g. "he had long dark eyes" - LONG eyes?!!!??). There is not much of a plot, all the characters are poorly developed, the dialogue is ludicrous, and I am still not entirely sure what the hell it was about and what Jackson's dilemma actually was. It is utter melodramatic drivel. The only reason that I have given it two stars as opposed to one star is because there are a few lovely and well written passages in it. But the novel does not work or hang together as a whole. I think it was meant to be a contemporary novel when it was written (in the 1990s) but nobody (even the British upper classes) spoke like that in the 1990s, so poor Iris must have been getting confused and thinking back to when she was a young woman because it had much more of a feel of the first half of the twentieth century than of the second half of the twentieth century. It is a shame to read such a poor final work from such a good writer. I think it would have been a greater mark of respect to Iris Murdoch to have left this unpublished because it is very poor compared to her other works and it is not exactly going to leave its mark in the canon of great English literature.

[Dennis · Rating 2 out of 5]

As I understand it, this was Iris Murdoch's last novel, written while she was in the early stages of Alzheimer's and it shows. Many writers in their later years stop writing complicated novels because it needs a lot of energy and is too hard to do at that point in life. This book is very similar to her earlier "Bruno's Dream" in that it involves a group of people coming together for an event - a wedding in this case - and leaving with an unintended and unforeseen partner. However, there is no leading up to anything in this case, no development, only confessions out of the blue and instant passion. There is also the mysterious and ubiquitous Jackson who seems to have an omniscient, mystical quality of all situations which helps him to tie all loose ends together with his knowledge of all things and people. This may have been borrowed from Agatha Christie's Pym (or from watching a lot of "Nanny and the Professor", who knows...?) but there are huge leaps where plotting may have been beyond her at that point. This is no way diminishes Iris Murdoch as a great writer, it only shows that even the greatest can't do things when they are hindered by illness.

[Haley · Rating 4 out of 5]

As my first book by Iris Murdoch, I approached this book with high expectations in terms of style, story, character, and intellectual fortitude. Murdoch does not disappoint, and instead crafts a story with shifting points of view, morphing relationships, and surprising characters. While several of them take a rather unprecedented interest in philosophy which leads to some didactic passages, what else are we to expect from a philosophy don turned novelist? In all, I was entertained by this book and felt edified at its close. Thoroughly satisfying.

[Paul Wilner · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are mentions of "The Tempest'' scattered throughout, and it's tempting to see this as Murdoch's final attempt, Prospero-like, to put the people, places and characters she has dealt with in her work to rest, even in a work that may seem "minor'' in comparison.
Futile to argue with the other comments - it's like responding to ratings on YouTube - but those who claim this shows the deterioration of her mental state clearly didn't notice the explorations of Heidegger, or the loving portrayals of human weakness, variously portrayed.